Loss and Abandonment

The author uses Demon’s first person account as a throughway into her overarching explorations regarding loss and abandonment. Indeed, Demon’s work to record his life story is the manifestation of his attempt to process and find healing from his succession of losses. In Chapter 62, he explains that his counselor has recommended writing “a recovery journal," so as to confront “some of [his] traumas” (525). Therefore, from the novel’s start to its end, Demon is recounting all of the times he has felt alone, abandoned, forgotten, or rejected as a way to move beyond these struggles. His account is a manifestation of his attempts to create a life and an identity not untouched, but unhindered by his loss.

From the start of Demon’s life, he is acquainted with the unreliability of the adults in his life, and thus the unreliability of the...